against a two state solution for palestine

national | miscellaneous | news report Monday April 08, 2002 14:56 by dave lordan

there is a disagreement among socialist as to the best road to the liberation of palestine. The swp argues for a united secular socialist state of Jews and Arabs living side by side. We do not believe that seperate jewish and palestinian states, both founded on the basis of racial and religious segregation, would lead to anything other than what james connolly called, refering to the partition of this country, 'a carnival of reaction'.

This is an article from 2000 on the so-called Oslo peace process. More on the middle east can be found at www.marxists.de

During the ten days of protest which tore the Palestinian peace process apart, one image stood out from the confusion – a 12 year old boy cowering behind his father as Israeli marksmen pounded their hiding place with bullets. The camera sees the father pleading for help. Then they both slump forward – the boy dead and the father critically wounded.

Mohammed Al-Durra’s death became a potent symbol of the growing crisis. Television viewers watching the dizzying spiral of violence in silent fascination on the nightly news, heard time and time again how the irrational “tribal hatreds” of the Middle East had killed any hope of peace. As Israeli soldiers hunted stone-throwing teenagers from Apache helicopters and executed peace activists in the streets, [1] headlines in the press accused the Palestinians of dragging the whole region into war. By mid-October more than 100 people had been killed, 95 of them Palestinians, including at least 13 minors shot by Israeli troops. [2] Despite pleas from the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, for a ceasefire during the summit meeting in Sharm al-Sheikh, the next round of funerals, protests, attacks and reprisals had only just begun. ITN’s reporter in Jerusalem accurately summed up the despair among commentators and journalists: “The tragedy is, only a few short months ago, peace was within the reach of the Israeli and Palestinian peoples”. [3]

Peace is a powerful word. After the last battle-scarred century so many people are weary of war. Nowadays even the most blatant war-mongers are keen to claim the “peace process” as their own. Noam Chomsky defines the term with bitter sarcasm:

The term “peace process” is a standard Orwellism, used uncritically in the United States, and adopted throughout much of the world, given its influence and power. In practice, the term refers to whatever the US leadership happens to be doing at the moment – often undermining the peace process in the literal sense of the term, as inspection of the facts makes rather clear. [4]

The gap between the myth of the “peace process” and the sordid realities of imperialism is nowhere greater than in the Middle East. The Palestinians exploded with rage in October 2000 because over the last seven years of negotiations the Israeli state has continued to steal their land, strangle their economy, demolish their houses, turn a blind eye to atrocities committed by Zionist settlers, and inflict collective punishment on entire communities for isolated acts of resistance and revenge. The entire “peace process” has been characterised by the further systemisation of Israeli oppression, using subtler weapons than in the past. During the “peace process” state terror has been concealed by urban planning regulations. Illegal territorial annexation has taken place under cover of highway construction. During the peace process the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip has almost doubled. [5] Arbitrary border closures have robbed thousands of families of their livelihoods.

In return Israel has conceded the bare minimum. Palestinians have been allowed to fly their flag, hang pictures of their president in Jericho bus station, run their own police force. Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has toured the diplomatic cocktail circuit, shaken hands with presidents and prime ministers, collected a part share in a Nobel Peace Prize. It has always been clear that even these minor concessions have come at a price. Arafat has loyally repaid his backers by policing his own people, using all the tools of any other Middle Eastern regime to keep opponents down – torture, arbitrary detention, silencing dissidents by assassination. The Palestinians” rage in the October Intifada was not simply directed at Israel and the US. It also targeted a Palestinian elite which had become a byword for betrayal and corruption. [6]

Top of the page

The two-state solution
Since 1993 the process of bargaining between Israel and the Palestinian leadership has given concrete expression to many trends which were previously only hidden undercurrents. The most important of these trends has been the open recognition by the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) of the state of Israel, and the reciprocal recognition by Israel of the PLO’s right to act as a national authority for the Palestinians. When Israeli and Palestinian leaders stood on the lawn of the White House for the historic photocall after signing the Declaration of Principles in September 1993, the handshakes were not simply the result of a few months of secret diplomacy. [7] In reality the accommodation between the two sides had been foreshadowed by developments in PLO strategy over 20 years before.

The PLO’s road to the White House lawn started back in the 1970s, when the organisation first began to move towards adopting the goal of establishing a “mini-state” in historic Palestine. Previously all Palestinian resistance groups had rejected any compromise which did not return Palestinians to all the land they had been driven out of by Israel in 1948. This included the rejection of UN resolution 242, the original partition plan for Palestine which envisaged the creation of two parallel states in the old British Mandate area – one a Zionist state, the other for the Palestinian Arabs. [8] However, the events of the 1960s and 1970s pushed key figures within the Fatah guerrilla organisation, which formed the leadership of the PLO, towards dropping the demand for the total liberation of Palestine. Firstly, the catastrophic defeat of the neighbouring Arab states by Israel in the Six Day War of 1967 underlined Fatah’s decision that any kind of conventional war against Israel was doomed to failure. Secondly, although young Palestinians flocked into the guerrilla training camps, Fatah’s adoption of the armed struggle precipitated a crisis in Jordan. In September 1970, with US and Israeli backing, King Hussein of Jordan sent the Jordanian army into the refugee camps to destroy the armed Palestinian presence in the country. The catastrophe of “Black September”, combined with further defeats for Egypt and Syria in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, hammered home the futility of relying on the Arab states to achieve the liberation of Palestine by force of arms. Khaled al-Hassan of the PLO’s executive committee put it like this:

We came to a decision that the best for us is that the West Bank and Gaza should be a Palestinian state ... The way to have a sort of freedom of work either now or after ten years is when we have our own land ... we cannot be 90 or 80 percent independent when we are working on the land of others. [9]

The pressure to compromise was not only external. Fatah had already established itself as the political voice of the Palestinian bourgeoisie in the exile communities. The tactical combination of guerrilla struggle, and negotiations with the Arab states and other regional powers reflected this relationship. The logical next step in Fatah’s project of state building was to come to an understanding with the principal imperialist powers.

When US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger dangled the prospect of a Palestinian “mini-state” in front of Fatah’s leaders they accepted. As Phil Marshall puts it:

When the Fatah leadership accepted the proposal it finally abandoned even a rhetorical commitment to its “revolutionary” attempt to replace Israel with a “democratic secular state” of Palestine. For the emphasis on Palestinian self-activity it substituted the notion of striking a bargain with the US and the local ruling classes. [10]

Top of the page

The road to Oslo
The PLO leadership’s willingness to drop its historic objections to the existence of Israel did not produce any tangible results for many years. In fact, in the early 1980s Israel seemed to be on the verge of destroying the PLO forever. The invasion of Lebanon forced the PLO to abandon its headquarters in Beirut and retreat to Tunisia. But by the late 1980s the situation had changed. In 1987 bitterness among the Palestinians living under Israeli occupation exploded into an uprising, or Intifada. Years of humiliation, poverty and repression fed the anger of a generation of young Palestinians who fought tanks with stones and home-made petrol bombs. The movement quickly developed from street clashes into a serious challenge to Israeli control of the Occupied Territories. One woman activist explained how the Intifada involved whole new sections of Palestinian society in the struggle:

The leadership really comes from inside the people themselves, reflecting the people’s own aspirations. This is because of the work of the popular committees ... when the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising calls for a general strike, not one shop is open, not one person walks on the street ... We see an uprising now that is ongoing, escalating. It involves all sectors of people now, all classes. We see the shopkeepers involved. We see the workers involved – it’s not just a student revolution. [11]

The success of the Intifada provided a huge boost to the PLO’s fortunes. The heroic resistance in the Occupied Territories put the Palestinian struggle for liberation in the centre of Middle Eastern politics once again. The PLO’s leadership took the opportunity to declare an independent Palestinian state at a meeting of the Palestinian National Council in Algiers in 1988.

The Intifada also gave impetus to a process of polarisation within Israeli society. A minority of Israelis were prepared to make a stand against the brutal repression of the uprising. Most of these liberals and left wingers became involved in peace campaigns and human rights organisations out of a sense of moral outrage at the worst excesses of the occupation. Other Israelis who took up the arguments for peace did so because they recognised that in the long term Israel could not hope to ever totally crush Palestinian resistance. Israeli academic Mark Heller argued in 1991:

Israel pays a price for its containment of Palestinian resistance, meaning that it runs political, economic, and social risks every day ... The occupation, though no longer as cheap as it was before the start of the Intifada, is still tolerable. But it does result in a constant stream of Israeli casualties, military and civilian, and it forces Israel to invest resources in riot control and police operations that could be more productively applied to civilian purposes or the build-up and modernisation of the Israeli Defence Forces. [12]

The impact of the peace movement remained confined to a small section of the Israeli population, however. The Israeli Labour Party’s historic grip on power had been gradually weakening throughout the 1980s, as the right wing Likud Party grew in strength. The 1990s were dominated by the success of the right, both in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, and on the streets. Extremist ultra-Orthodox settler groups argued for the expulsion of all Israeli Arabs and organised for a war of ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians. Although the most well known of these organisations, Kach, led by Meir Kahane, was eventually outlawed, the genocidal ranting of the extreme right is a logical development of the arguments of mainstream Israeli politicians:

Ultimately, the Israeli right is angry with Kahane because he says what they think: that the Jewish state should annex the Occupied Territories and expel all of Israel’s unruly Arabs. And declaring that openly is not good public relations. [13]

The growing strength of the religious right explains why the pressure of the Intifada on its own was not enough to push Israel into talks with the PLO. Teenagers armed with rocks and bottles could never hope to defeat one of the best equipped armies on earth. It was the shifting balance of power within the Middle East which pushed Israel into negotiations. The collapse of the Soviet Union allowed the US to establish itself as the dominant power in the region. The display of US firepower in the Gulf War of 1991 convinced even the most reluctant Arab states to make a final peace with American imperialism. The coalition of states which backed the US against Iraq included longtime clients such as Egypt and newcomers such as Syria.

The establishment of the “New World Order”, George Bush’s shorthand for American hegemony, allowed the US to move towards setting up negotiations over Palestine. US officials hoped that this deal would allow them to strike a political balance between support for their Arab clients and a continued commitment to Israel. Luckily, Arafat had already provided one further concession to kickstart the whole process – the PLO finally recognised the state of Israel. Eventually Israel realised that the time was ripe to strike a deal. By choosing to take part in secret negotiations in Norway, it hoped to set whatever terms it liked without the interference of the US. In addition, it sensed that the PLO’s weakness would create a Palestinian authority which was almost totally dependent on Israel. As Chomsky argues:

The PLO had come to be despised by much of the population of the territories for its corruption and absurd posturing, and by 1993, opposition to Arafat and calls for democratisation of the organisation had reached dramatic levels ... As a virtual Israeli agent, Arafat could maintain his fiefdom, even with access to substantial funds. [14]

In September 1993 Israeli and Palestinian negotiators spelt out in public the details of the “peace process” for the first time. The Declaration of Principles (DOP) formed the basis for the next seven years of bargaining. The document maps out the extent of the PLO leadership’s capitulation in black and white. [15] Over the following years Israel used the framework of the DOP to systematise its control over the Occupied Territories while making concessions on the symbols of statehood. During the “peace process” Israeli strategy has been played out with the approval of the world’s press and the support of the US. In this case diplomacy has served as an extension of war by other means.